(ClilPhilosophy n.2)
# . Intro
What if… we were complitely free?
Free not only from the will of someone else or from the determinated circumstances in wich we have to take a certain decision, but free also from the latest condining of the real world?
What if we ere able do define, design and realize our favourite world?
# debate: How would you imagine your “brand new world”?
1. Are you sure that the world that you consider “real” …is “really real”?
What is real? How do I know? What am I? What should I do? Who can I trust?
These are just a few out of many questions on which The Matrix is built up.
In 1999, with this astonishing movie, the Wachowski Brothers literally revolutionized the boundaries in action scenes shooting and – someone says – they reinvented the sci-fi genre. But, above all, they translated into a video-game-framework most of the fundamental issues of our philosophical tradition.
After watching the movie, the students are split into teams of four or five each and enter a competition. They have to:
- find the largest number of names – of characters, places, objects etc. – which remind of something else (i.e. Trinity)
- recall the largest number of explicit quotations of philosophers, philosophical concepts or theories, or even literature, theater, cinema, art…
- identify the largest number of implicit quotations of philosophers, philosophical concepts or theories, or even from literature, theater, cinema, art…
- formulate the largest number of philosophical questions which arise from the movie
2 . Ask the question.
This is the last game of the contest.
5. Each student/team now chooses one of the above-identified questions and tries to argue it, organizing it in a brief essay, or in a short presentation, or in another creative and personal way.
After a public presentation of all the works, each student votes for his favourite one (out of his own work, of course!).
3 . and the winner is…
…the team which gain more points.
now.here 
ANCIENT SMITHS
What is reality?
Do we really exist?
Can we really understand how reality works?
Is it better illusion or reality?
What is worth fighting for?
Are we really free to choose?
Does knowing the consequences influence our actions?
Does destiny rule our lives?
Is love rational?
Can our body survive without the mind?
Does our soul exist?
Will we lose control of our technological progress?
Can technology develope some kind of intelligence?
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WHITE RAbBIT
Is the world where we live real?
Are we simply sleeping?
Is the human mind limited?
What are we able to truly understand?
Are we free to take a decision? If yes, does a correct way to choose exsist?
Are we effectively free? If no, are we always under control of something/someone else?
Is the human mind able to be merely rational and objective?
Can we contain our inner instinct and emotions?
Shall we trust each other?
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Morpheus group
Philosophical Issues
Are we completely free to either behave, speak or do whatever requires a choice?
Are we awake or asleep? Are we living in a dream?
Do we twist our point of view? Can we manipulate our vision of the reality? Is our perspective manipulated? Are we narrow-minded or even blind? How can we broaden our horizons, change our perspectives, in order to become more “open-broad-right minded”?
Where and what is the truth? Do we really need to know it? Would we be happier if we knew the whole truth? Is ignorance bliss?
Are we capable of understanding the reality? Would we be able to do that, namely to go beyond the Schopenauer’s “veil of Maya”?
Are our actions depending only on our mind’s intentions? Holds the brain all the power of making us successfull? Subsequently, is the mind the ONLY limit? Can we achieve whatever we want? How does our attitude affect our results? Do we just need to think we would succeed, in order to reach our goals? DO we need to know or we need to believe?
How can we choose? Are we unlimited making choices? How can we know what is good or bad? Making choices would be easier, if we knew exactly what the consequences are? Can we predict the effects of every action? Is there something unpredictable? Are we forward-looking? Is our fore-sight useless and damaging or usefull and enriching?
Is hope only an illusion? Does it give real power or it is just fake?
Has everything a beginning and an end? How can we prevent everything from coming to an end?
Is love true? Is love another illusion since it is not touchable? Is love rational? How does it affect our decisions?
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ANCIENT SMITHS
Since the man appeared on Earth, nature has been object of study: we tried to find causal relationships, in order to understand how really this world works. Although scientific research gave us uncountable results, it looks like that the more we know, the more we realize that reality is complex. Can we really understand how it works?
We discussed this topic together, and we came up with different answers; some of us think that a definitive prove of our ability to “read” nature schemes is provided by the fact that we actually manage to formulate scientific laws, which allow us to make previsions. The other part of the group, instead, thinks that reality cannot be totally comprehended by our brains, and that there are some aspects that we are unable to understand. On the one hand, science gives instruments to explain nature, but on the other hand (agreeing with Kant’s phylosophy) there could be some other details unintelligible for our minds’ power. For now, we avoided the idealistic idea; we concentrated on the real presence of laws which organize reality.
One of us said that even if our mind was limited towards some aspects of reality, we couldn’t know that, and maybe we shouldn’t even ask ourselves these kind of questions, because our lives would be completely exclused from that. The answer to this agnostic idea was that even science is now considering the hypothesis of a world composed by more than 4 dimensions, and this is given by the need of explaining the essence of matter. If nature could be completely understood, there shouldn’t be problems that cannot be explained using what we know about this world: and these issues exist. Moreover, why should the human race be able to understand all reality? Or why not?
At the end of our discussion, we convinced pretty much all that reality cannot be solved completely in our mind’s limits. We can’t say why, but our way of thinking allows us to understand a part of it: this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing out of it, though. Perhaps, the real challenge for mankind is to try going beyond its possibilities of knowledge.
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Morpheus Group
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ARE WE ABLE TO DISTINGUISH REALITY FROM FICTION?
It has happened to all of us to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if what we had experienced was really a dream or was reality. That’s bacause when we dream we aren’t able to understand that we are actually dreaming. Our mind brings us to think and act in the dream as we were living. After a wonderful dream when we realized that it was not reality we say: “oh no, it was only a dream. That’s a pity!”
A very powerful example is the famous Myth of the Cave of Platon, in which a group of men live there entire life in a cave, tied to a chair looking at some moving shadows. They actually think that is the reality, because they didn’t know that there is something different outside. They didn’t try anything else. When a person goes out the cave understand that the real life is there, and he has much more things to do.
The same thing happenes in a film that has just come out and it is called : “Room”. It’s the story of a young mum that was kidnapped and kept looked in a single room, together with her little son. The mum said to the boy that the room was the entire world so he didn’t know anything else apart from that room.
The boy think that his real world was that tiny space and was really scared when they have the opportunity to escape.
Illusions are for this reason a contraddiction between the senses because we immagine somethings that doesn’t exist, moreover a contraddiction cannot be true so that illusions must be unreal because of it is a false perception of reality.
Our five senses provided us with the ability to experience reality, infact our world is perceive through the senses, when they are not working the illusions are created.
Anyway illusion stay always in touch with reality.
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“A matter of choice”
An art travel
by White Rabbit Group
Throught our short but intense and really stimulating clil project, we have delt with the urging and ancient problem of what taking a decision implies. This is a really complicated and fascinating theme, that writers, philosophers and also directors, as we have known have tried to describe and in same cases even to solve. Thus, now we would like to show you how we think this issue could be allegorically be rappresented in the art field.
Firstly ,we have selected a really famous painting of the German and romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, entitled “The Wanderer above mists”…
The painting shows a man that from the top of some rocks is admiring an endless see of mists and other rocks, that from our metaphorical point of view stand for the countless possibilities that a choice could have. Moreover, the mist and the rocks are both fascinating and frightful, in a word: sublime; due to their double potentiality to hid: on the one hand positive possibilities and results, that could make us happy and proud of our previous choices; on the other hand drawbacks and pains, due to a wrong choice, which could make us regret.
Now, we strongly would like you to understand that actually each of us is constantly on these rocks…
Therefore, this paint manage to represent the dramatic human condition. As a result of that, each man or woman is torn between the two aspects of the sublime possibility of taking a decision. An act that none of us could avoid dealing with, because also when we do not take a decision, implicitly, we are actually taking one.
However, in most of cases when we have to decide things such as a university to attend, whether getting marry or nor, or simply a gift for a friend; we risk to became paralyzed, more and more undecided and consequently to despair. A similar condition was well painted by Edward Munch, in his canvases entitled “The Scream”…..
Thus, observing these picture we can try to understand what implies being paralyzed and unable to deal with reality and the responsibility of a choice. Some of you could be thinking that for them it is not a problem to choose. Yes, it could certainly be an easy thing, a matter of mere self-confident and determination, as plenty of people could think, or instead a huge issue, us we reckon.
And so: why did we choose this issue?
Because taking a decision simply means “walking a street instead of another” and this could be something that deeply affects our life, determining what we are and will become. In other words the freedom of choice is the fundamental feature of the mankind, the characteristic that makes us what we are: animals provided of reason and free to deny our simple emotions and instincts in order to really realize what we want to be.
Indeed we could say, as Feuerbach stated, that we are a sort of product of our beliefs, decision and in other words of what we concretely eat. Thus, admire this amazing painting called “Vertumno” and done by Arcimboldo….
Naturally it is often claimed that we are not really free to choose, indeed each single person has an own culture, a specific DNA and a personal family background, which all together compose a part of its personality. In addition, according to the determinism they may influence our choices and instead, for the soft ones only in part. Thus, see how the canvas painted by De Chirico and entitled “L’Archeologo” shows that we are also history and memories…
Finally, we want leave you with a picture of Pollock, it doesn’t matter which one, because as he declared his paintings don’t have a proper title, so that the viewer has the responsibility to give it to them, being free to show what he was really able to understand in Pollock’s confused canvasses. Thus again, we are called to take a decision and give a title to a picture. Oh! Don’t worry! This is only an exercise that may train us, helping to be ready to tackle the constant necessity to choose of the life…
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